Conventions

Conventions

Conventions help create organization within this wiki (http://wiki.laptop.org). These conventions include:

• Article (page) naming
• Template and Status Box use
• Category tagging and hierarchy

The wiki is growing as the OLPC program becomes more popular and touches more lives. Conistency becomes helpful in aiding users find and compare similar information. This article collects proposals and records conventions in order to bring more consistency to the wiki in service of making it a more accessible and useful resource.

Conventions & Proposals

What's in a name? Why Conventions

This wiki hopes to be the main repository of information for the OLPC project. The wiki contains a large number of articles for overlapping audiences: the general public, developers, laptop users, educators, policy makers, and others. Information is gathered from the various communication channels and added into articles.

Some of the information resembles a database in its natural organization with details of related items set out in separate articles with similar layouts. The information often varies too much to use an identical layout or traditional database.

The Wiki Way emphasizes making information available. The first sources of information are often rough, even cut-and-paste from email conversations that contain a technical data point or a stub of basic information. Everyone can edit. Some readers wordsmith the prose to make it more readable. Others add a new link or some new information. A more passionate reader may clean-up, reorganize, and research an expanded article. There is no approval process: people just edit.

As the Wiki grows, conventions aid readers and contributors by making it easier for them find articles that share similar characteristics without imposing much burden on the article writers. For example, putting a [[Category:Keyboard]] tag into all articles related to keyboards helps everyone.

Adding a Proposal for Changes To Many Articles

Edits require more effort when a change will need to be made to more than a handful of articles. A reader may need skim many nearly identical articles, discover the real organization behind the articles, and then separately edit each article. A change in convention may need to be made on many existing articles and therefore potentially impacts many readers. More care and thought is required for such large-scale modifications than the wiki-standard WP:BRD for a single article edit.

The goal of these larger changes is to make wiki better for another round of growth. While the new changes need not be permanent solution, they should be good enough for the next year. No one wants to constantly reorganize the wiki. Building a consensus and inviting comment in advance cuts down on effort in making changes.

To make a proposal, write it below. Add a note and link to the talk page of some of the proposed articles to alert those readers of the proposed change. Others may comment on your proposal, make improvements, discuss ideas, and try to build some consensus. Consider your proposal accepted once you have consensus or if about a week goes by with no new comments. Then move the proposal, removing discussions, into the accepted conventions. Then you make the necessary changes to all the articles. You should propose a change only if you are passionate enough about the change to do the work.

It is not generally necessary to discuss conventions that already show signs of being widely accepted on this wiki, many conventions developed by Wikipedia contributors have been adopted or adapted for use on this wiki and Wikipedia makes a useful reference for how similar situations are handled by a large group of collaborators.

Proposed Changes

Put your proposed change here. A good proposal includes a title, date you wrote it, link to your user page, a well written convention for how future arguments are made along with examples, and a list of some of the pages affected.

Example Proposal

Here's an example proposal (these are not actual signatures, but it does paraphrase a similar discussion):

Articles of Specific Keyboard Layouts by User:Cjl on April 8, 2008.

Keyboard Layouts To Be Named "OLPC language_name (language_code) Keyboard". For example, "OLPC Spanish (es) Keyboard". The language name and code come from the ISO 639 codes, with the two character code preferred over the three character code. These pages should also have categories [[Category:Keyboard]][[Category:Keyboard Layout]] and the category tags of countries that use this keyboard. While there may be multiple keyboards per country, multiple keyboards per language are unlikely. Those could be titled "OLPC Spanish (es) Mexico Type Keyboard".

Currently, the keyboard layouts just have a category tag of Keyboard and are named after specific countries. For example, all Spanish countries, e.g., Argentina, Mexico, Chile, Argentina, etc., use the keyboard layout OLPC Argentina Keyboard because that was the first country for which the keyboard was designed. Keyboards generally go by language. The OLPC designator applies because the keyboards generally come through OLPC and it helps keep the Keyboard Category uncluttered. The ISO usage in language names and codes keeps out ambiguity.

This should changes about twenty pages including OLPC Argentina Keyboard, OLPC Armenian Keyboard, OLPC Nigeria Keyboard and others.

Comments?

• The country tags might be overkill, given how many countries speak Spanish but have no deployments --Walter 17:21, 9 April 2008 (EDT)
  • OK. Country pages with deployments will link to the page anyway. -- Cjl 17:34, 9 April 2008 (EDT)
• BTW, do we need a new Keyboad Template category? -- CharlesMerriam 20:45, 9 April 2008 (EDT)
  • eh, Can't hurt ---- Cjl 15:34, 10 April 2008 (EDT)
    • You're right; it can't. -- CharlesMerriam 20:45, 9 April 2008 (EDT)

After being quiet for about a week, Cjl then makes all the changes to the articles and moves the editted proposal to the Accepted Conventions section. The comments are deleted but still available in the history page.

Active Proposals:

Keyboard Layouts page naming/tagging proposal

Cjl 00:39, 9 April 2008 (EDT)

• Keyboard pages will generally be named in the form "OLPC language/script (language_code) keyboard". For example, "OLPC Spanish (es) Keyboard".
  • The language code should come from the ISO 639 codes, with the two character code preferred over the three character code.

Accepted Conventions

Please pick a section into which you put your convention: the wiki has become rather large. When in doubt, either guess or just put under the closest major heading.

Usage Around The World

Country Information

Country Pages

See description on page Category:Countries